Screenwriters often find themselves with PDF of a screenplay when they actually need a Final Draft (.fdx) file that they can edit. Here are three ways to convert from PDF to fdx, ranging from painful to sublime.

John and Craig debate the perils and possibilities of bringing iPads into movie theaters. Is Disney’s Little Mermaid iPad app a way to breathe new life into a classic, or a slippery slope towards cinematic ruin? It’s a conversation with plenty of umbrage — but from an unexpected source.

John and Craig talk about perspective — both within a scene and the overall story. It’s not always obvious to the reader which characters are in the driver’s seat, so it falls on the screenwriter to make that clear.

Currently, there’s no way for us to do volume licensing through the Mac App Store. At first glance, that seems to be no big deal, since Mac apps (unlike iOS apps) don’t have to be installed through official channels. But that means we have to figure out our own way to handle serial numbers and updates, and possibly maintain multiple versions of the app.

Over the past four weeks, Stuart and I have had the opportunity to cut a few projects in the new FCP X and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. I think the differences in our reactions are largely based on how familiar we were with the old version.

A few weeks ago, I expressed exasperation upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what? It’s actually a lot better. Yes, that could […]

Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.) We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re […]

In Final Draft, what do you use the “General” element for? The manual describes its function negatively, saying only that it’s for whatever doesn’t fit into the other elements. Personally, I haven’t found a use for it yet and was wondering what the pros use it for. – Richard Budd As far as I know, […]

Reader Josh C wrote in with one solution to a problem that’s been frustrating me for months. When you want to save a script as a .pdf, Final Draft won’t always include the title page. It’s frustratingly inconsistent. The obvious workaround is to save the title page as a separate file, which is what I’ve […]

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists at Sundance […]

Final Draft, the screenwriting application I use most despite profound reservations, has been upgraded to 7.1.3. I haven’t gotten it to crash, so that’s something. My assistant Chad had never used the Tools>Reformat command, which despite its clunky interface is a huge timesaver when importing text from other places.1 Basically, it steps through your script […]

This afternoon, I opened up a recently-created Final Draft script in TextMate, to see how easily I could pull out the text. As one would expect, there was a lot of incomprehensible goobledygook. But there was also a surprising amount of detritus left over from previous projects — notably Big Fish. It’s a little troubling […]

Today’s Variety reports that the makers of Final Draft have bought Script magazine and some related assets from Forum Publishing. The deal probably makes sense for Final Draft. Rather than buy a big ad every month, why not just buy the whole magazine? Plus, Final Draft probably has a huge mailing list from its software […]

Macworld has a review of Mariner Software’s Montage, which is pretty much right on the money. They give it two out of five mice, admiring its interface while pointing out that it doesn’t do nearly as much as it should: page locking, scene numbering and many other standard features are still on the drawing board. […]